If one takes a look at the german discourse on professionalization in teaching, it is noticeable that the concepts of reflection and reflexivity are gaining more and more importance (Kratz 2022, Dlugosch & Kratz 2022). This is especially true for its biography-oriented strand, which is currently experiencing an enormous upswing.
Teachers as "reflective practitioners" (Hauser, Wyss 2021), have become an inseparable part of professionalization discourses related to teaching (Dlugosch Kratz 2022). Similar ideas also emerge in anglophone discourse, drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks (Brookfield, 2009). This paradigm is closely associated - largely across school systems - with the ability to adopt "professional agency" (Kuorelathi et al. 2015) and to engage in building relationships with students who are perceived as challenging (Rae et al., 2017).
Mostly detached from each other, new theoretical reflections and didactic formats appear in this discourse, which are supposed to be theoretically justified and practically produced by trainee teachers as reflective practitioners (Paseka, Schneider & Compe 2018). This again reveals considerable theoretical openness (Hascher & Hagenauer, 2016). This close succession, and with it the vagueness of its theoretical anchoring, is now itself negotiated as an unreflective tradition (Hauser, Wyss 2021: 8).
In our contribution, we align ourselves with this skeptical view and combine it with the observation that, contrary to the diversity of theoretical concepts and higher education didactic offerings, "reflective practitioners" continue to elude empirical visibility in the field (Helsper 2011, 163).
In detail, we show that the central categories of the discourse "reflection" and "reflexivity" suffer from a theoretical deficit, which is particularly noticeable due to the exclusion of psychoanalytic knowledge. In our opinion, the categories are not (yet) suitable as a "Vanishing point of teacher education" (Dlugosch, Kratz 2022). Although Datler & Wininger (2016), for example, plead for a psychoanalytically guided understanding of emotion as the core of a university education, its structural anchoring and praxeology remain unclear.
To systemize this working hypothesis, we focus on a metaphor which is used repeatedly in connection with the concepts of reflection and reflexivity in the discourse of professionalization related to teaching. In our estimation, with the aim of overcoming the lack of theory.
Here, one can read about "experimental spaces" (Völter 2018) and "fantasy spaces" (Helsper 2018, p. 73) as well as "spaces for biographical and memory work" (ibid.) in which reflection is supposed to be made possible. This metaphor of space is thereby, contrary to its metaphorical range of meaning, very concrete and curricularly conceived in the texts and fails to negotiate space as something social that itself emerges from sociality.
With references to selected psychoanalytic metaphors of space, especially those of Alfred Lorenzer (1973), Donald Winnicott (Winnicott 1965/2006) and Wilfred Bion (1992), we broaden the view and offer new perspectives for the discourse on professionalization in teaching. In doing so, we negotiate that spaces of reflection as social entities can emerge or be prevented in institutional and organizational contexts.
 

On the one hand, we concretize our theoretical considerations in the article on the basis of selected episodic-narrative interviews conducted with trainee teachers (N100) who documentarily remember episodes of their educational biography. Using the material as an example, we trace how spaces of reflection in social-communicative, intersubjective space can emerge, be held, or be destroyed. The data material originates from the Lotte Köhler-funded study "Biographical narration as a professional educational space" (Kratz 2022). On the other hand, we use current term papers written by university students, in which they deal with a case report from their professional experience, taking into account the emotional involvement, and including the peer group as a field of resonance.

The interest of our contribution aims first and foremost at a psychoanalytically based determination of the relevance of (auto-)biographical narration in psychosocial studies. Secondly, it aims at the presentation of a broad connectivity of elaborated psychoanalytic knowledge to a current discourse in educational science. The working hypothesis guiding both target perspectives is that one can deal psychoanalytically with the deficit of theory in the discourse of professionalization, in particular through symbolization theory. Moreover, our contribution reminds us that the question of a biographical-reflexive teacher education has been explicitly conducted within psychoanalytic pedagogy for 50 years already and seems like a forgotten narrative in the mainstream of the current professionalization discourse.

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